Asher Brown Durand Biography | Oil Paintings

8-21-1796 Maplewood, USA - 9-17-1886 Maplewood, USA

Asher Brown Durand was apprenticed to an engraver for five years starting in1812 and upon completion of his apprenticeship, he entered into a partnership with the owner of the firm, who asked him to run the New York branch. He engraved Declaration of Independence for John Trumbull in 1823, and this established Durand's reputation as one of the nation's finest engravers.

Asher Brown Durand helped to organize the New York Drawing Association in 1825, which would later become the famed National Academy of Design, he served as the organization's president from 1845 to 1861.

In 1830, with the encouragement and support of his patron, Luman Reed, he gave up engraving to concentrate on oil painting. In 1837, he went with his friend and founder of the Hudson River School art movement, Thomas Cole to the Adirondacks mountains to sketch the beautiful surroundings and soon after he began to focus only on landscape oil painting. Having discovered its beauty, he then spent his summers in the Catskills and Adirondacks Mountains of New York, and the White Mountains of New Hampshire, making hundreds of drawings and oil sketches that were later completed into finished Academy pieces in his studio, which helped to define the Hudson River School.

One of Asher Brown Durand's painting is Progress (The Advance of Civilization). The landscape depicts America's progress starting on the left, with a natural undisturbed state and Native American Indians looking on, towards the right, where there are roads, telegraph wires, a canal, railroads, and steamboats.

Asher Brown Durand painted in1849 Kindred Spirits. This was painted as a tribute to Cole's death in 1848 showing Thomas Cole and poet William Bryant in a Catskills Mountains landscape. Bryant's daughter donated it to the New York Public Library in 1904, it was sold by the library through a Sotheby's auction in 2005 to Walmart heiress Alice Walton for US$35.0 million.